This is a podcast for the curious. Strap yourself in for genuine dialogues with people who think deeply and are ready to tackle the big questions, such as broadcaster Terry O'Reilly, fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay, and journalist Sally Armstrong.

How do you engage with social media, with the internet, and with
technology as a whole? Are you in control of your emotions, your
content, your data? Do you know why these things are important? Or
are you being swept away, morphed into a reactive, maybe even
primitive dopamine-seeking animal by one of the most powerful,
transformative forces ever to shape and challenge our
civilization?

What on earth is going on with fake news, post-truth, and a new
relativism in data, information, journalism, opinion and fact? How
on earth did we get so polarized in our societies and in our
politics? Is it getting worse, or are we, by virtue of being in the
midst of it, just incapable of seeing this transformation for what
it really is? Are these anxieties merely the growing pains of a
metamorphosis that will take us far beyond what we can currently
conceive, or are they the signals of something truly dangerous,
something that threatens the deep underpinnings of our
civilization?

What on earth is going on with extremism sharing space with
mainstream thought? The kind of extremism that was given no oxygen
just a few years ago. First uncomfortable dinner conversations,
then Twitter trolls, then online news outlets, and then US
presidents who equivocate on white supremacy. How did we get here?
Is this a blip that we’ll one day shake off, or are we reverting
wholesale to an earlier version of ourselves?

What on earth is going on when most people get their news from
Facebook, which can often feel like nothing better than an echo
chamber for your own biases? What about these platforms being
compromised, whether by data pirates or political operatives or
Russian state hackers – and how might they be compromised going
forward? Have we already let the big corporations (Google, Apple,
Facebook, Amazon, Uber) get away with too much real-world power,
too much data, too much influence on our minds and habits? The
sheer strength of these companies and their algorithms mean that
they can know us better than we know ourselves. They can influence
our thinking through addictive apps and indispensable mobile
phones, through nudges in advertising or tweaks to the secret
sauce. Our own free will may be at stake. Is it too late to turn
back? Are we already too addicted to the technology we have
birthed? A technology which has reordered the world in less than a
generation? What on earth is going on here?

Technological change has been part of the human story since the
very beginning. Even before our species had the power to record our
history, we learned to make fire, craft tools, and manipulate our
environment to improve our chances of survival and reproduction. It
could even be argued that technology is our ecological niche. We
aren’t terribly strong or large or fast. Instead, we have these
brains, and cognition to go with it, and so have evolved to become
masters of technology – tireless innovators by genetic inheritance.
Even language, which forms the basis of everything we are as a
civilization, is technological as soon as it is taught, or written,
or recorded.

Thus, it wasn’t long before we cultivated crops and domesticated
animals, built rafts then boats then ships for the sea, moved from
stone tools and weapons to bronze ones and then to iron. We built
the rock circle of Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Giza. With
improved sanitation, increasing food supplies due to agricultural
technology and medicine to ward off death a little longer, our
population grew at first comfortably and then exponentially. Our
species went from hunter-gatherer to world conquerer in a few tens
of thousands of years.

But like the expansion of the universe, human technology has not
just grown, it has grown at an accelerating rate. The agricultural
revolution took millennia. The Iron Age transition took centuries.
The Industrial Revolution? Within a few decades of the late 18th
and early 19th centuries, Britain was transformed. The same
throttling wave of change swept over Europe and North America and
eventually the world. Some argue that this revolution is ongoing,
especially in places like China, where the migration of people from
the countryside to the cities is recognized as the largest
short-term movement of humans. Ever. Yet, here’s what’s important
about the Industrial Revolution: the change occurred and was
noticeable in a single generation. Someone in early 19th century
England could be born in one world and die in a whole new one.

Today, over two centuries since the start of the Industrial
Revolution, we now seem to be in the middle of a new one: the
Digital Revolution. And the rate of change has accelerated
dramatically, not in decades but in years, maybe even in months.
Someone born in a western nation in 1984, when rotary phones and
were common and colour television not universal, turned 18 in a
world where basic cell phones were typical and phone books
vanishing. Today she raises a family in a world where the internet
and social media is the dominant shaper of social and cultural
spheres, where she doesn’t remember phone numbers, and where the
power of massive corporations and government to see, track and know
her is on par with Big Brother, from the book with the same title
as the year she was born: 1984. How many more times will
her paradigm shift, and what will it all look like when she dies?
Or, will we have beaten death by then, whether by enhancing her
body with biotech or uploading her consciousness to the Cloud?

This is all a little cliché and overly generalized. But the
change in which we process information, develop and share opinions
and arguments, and connect to each other socially is undeniable,
and this shift has occurred in just a few years. Remember the Arab
Spring of 2011? It seems like ages ago. Here’s what esteemed
American broadcaster Dan Rather said not long after: “From the
streets of Cairo and the Arab Spring, to Occupy Wall Street, from
the busy political calendar to the aftermath of the tsunami in
Japan, social media was not only sharing the news but driving
it.”

What on earth is going on? It’s hard to describe the shape of
the bubble when you’re inside of it. But here’s something to chew
on: in China, the government is imposing a new system of social
credit, which is tied to every individual and linked to their
social media presence. They’ve been working on it for years. Are
you getting enough exercise? Doing well at your job? Paying your
bills on time? You’ll get points for that. Are you critical of the
government? Anti-social? Free-thinking? Docked points for that.
This whole thing might sound harmless to you – as in, who cares
about these social media points?

If you think that, I’d encourage you to watch just one episode
of the show Black Mirror. It's called "Nosedive". We already
rate businesses and Uber drivers, and accept being rated as
consumers on these services as well. An expansion wouldn’t be too
difficult or uncomfortable. In fact, if it’s all designed like a
game, we might think it’s more fun. Do you think they’ll do it in
China but never here? I say, people might want such a system, even
if only for the dopamine fix for when they score well. After all,
we’ve given everything else away with our phones and tablets, and
we’ve made seemingly bigger tradeoffs in our collective past. Why
not just go full Orwell?

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About the Podcast

Your weekly podcast for a world in flux.
Globalization and climate change. The rise of social media and the decline and fall of Blockbuster Video. AI and VR. Donald Trump and Flat Earthers. The world is changing so fast that we can't get a grip on how we got here, let alone where we're headed.
Join Ben Charland as he peels back the headlines to ask, what are the events, characters, forces and ideas that shape the human story today? Have things always been this nuts, or are they getting crazier by the day? Who were those barbarians that took down the Blockbuster Empire? Just what on Earth is going on?